Slashdot Mirror
Sony Rootkit Phones Home
strider44 writes "Mark from Sysinternals has digged a little deeper into the Sony DRM and discovered it Phones Home with an ID for the CD being listened to. XCP Support claims that "The player has a standard rotating banner that connects the user to additional content (e.g. provides a link to the artist web site). The player simply looks online to see if another banner is available for rotation. The communication is one-way in that a banner is simply retrieved from the server if available. No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities." Also on this topic, Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!" Update: 11/07 14:21 GMT by H : Attentive reader Matteo G.P. Flora also notes that an Italian lawyer has filed suit against Sony on behalf of the Italian equivalent of the EFF. Translation availabe through the hive mind. Update: 11/07 15:18 GMT by H : It does appear that in fact Sony does see through the $sys$ - see Muzzy's comment for more details.
In Soviet Russia . . . DRM bypasses YOU!
Patrolling ftw
I think you misunderstand.
I meant that the months I only use 45 minutes, i still have to pay for 2000 minutes and will lose the ones I don't use unless I have a roll-over plan in which case the minutes are transferred and you end up with thousands of minutes that you will not use and still have to pay for additional new 2000 minutes each month. Horrible. And it doesn't really matter who you choose, it's not about how much it costs to go over (which is basically robbery from the cell phone company), but that you pay for minutes you'll never use and hence each minute you really use, becomes way too expensive. A horrible system designed to suck as much as possible out of our pockets while providing a minimum in return.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Look, you have several choices.
You can buy less minutes than you generally need, and pay overage occasionally.
You can buy more minutes than you generally need, and get a predictable bill.
You can buy a little more than you generally need on a Roll-Over plan (currently only available on Cingular and their affiliates), and not get hit too hard when you do go over.
You can go Pay As You Go. Cingular, Virgin Mobile, and T-Mobile all have decent plans in that area that require very little as the minimum call spend. Check them out.
All are available in the US, and Sprint PCS also has the "Fair and Flexible" plan which makes overage less of an issue.
What countries do you not have that choice, and why do you consider not being able to buy (note: not "buying", but "having the choice if you want it") more minutes than you need an advantage?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No other country?
I don't mean to get nasty here, but that is positively wrong. I've used cell phones since the 80's in my homecountry, all the way uo until 1999 when I moved to USA. I NEVER had a plan, I always paid the same price per minute, no matter how much or little I talked and the minutes were billed to me at the end of each periode.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Really? They *refused* to offer any talk plans at all with bundled minutes in your (unspecified) home country, to anyone? I find that hard to believe.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He is responding to the parent. This is certainly flamebait, but NOT OFFTOPIC. RTFModeratorGuidlines.
"where words meet intent, lies rhetoric's lament"
There's probably never going to be a "True PAYG" plan as you've defined it because there are fixed resources that phone users are using by keeping their lines open - namely that the infrastructure to ensure a call can be connected has to be there, whether it's a telephone number or whatever else. There is an incentive on carriers to encourage their customers to spend something or disconnect.
Using a more reasonable definition, I'd say that most US PAYG plans are PAYG. You may have to make a minimum top-up every three months, but you will not lose that credit as long as you do so. That credit's available, and your minutes will be charged against it. The issue here, I think, is that a lot of people who say they want "PAYG" are actually looking for "Emergency Back-up Phone that Costs As Little As Possible". Whether it makes commercial sense to have such a tariff, especially when you can't say "Oh well, at least they make leave the phone on for incoming calls and use it largely for that" is open to question.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Refused? No, but there was never any plans in the first place. And the mysterious country is called Norway. I just checked and now they have taken to the same stupidity as US and I called my ex-wife to see when that happened and it seems like over the past 2-3 years the system has changed. I normally called as much or as little as I needed to and each month I got an invoice from the phone company specifying how many minutes I had used and the price per minute and a nice sum for me to pay. Best way for the consumer since you don't pay up front, don't have to guess how much you need, never have to worry about "losing" minutes. Too bad they have taken to the same crappy deals as we have here. You can check for yourself over at www.telenor.no or www.tele2.no/privat/mobil
:-)
So, I guess you ARE right after all, every country seems to be offering the same crappy shit and ripping off customers. Oh well, I was wrong!
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I use most of my (700) minutes, I also get free M2M and unlimited nights and weekends on my plan, shared amongst myself and my fiance, of which we generally use several thousand minutes. I fail to see how it's a rip-off or "crappy shit". If I used my phone to anything like the same extent on any pay-as-you-go tariff in the UK or US I'm aware of, I'd be paying $150-300 a month (and that's assuming I've carefully selected the plan.) I'm paying more like $75, and I know, the occasional text message or international phone call aside, that's all I'm going to pay.
So it's not "crappy shit". It's a poor choice, perhaps, if you don't use your phone very often, but that's what choices are for. The fact there are packaged plans doesn't mean there aren't any pay as you go systems. I mentioned a while range. If you think that your average bill on a PAYG plan would be well under what you'd pay on a monthly plan, then go with that. It wouldn't suit me, so I don't do it.
One thing I intensely dislike is the European attitude that people should have phones, but be punished for actually using them. That's what time charges amount to. This is a wonderful technology. It links people in ways never before imagined. With modern digital networks, there's more than enough capacity to go around in practice. There's no reason to discourage its use.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Technically, I guess that if they can't afford a house, and others can, they are by definition "the lower end of society". It's just that the upper end only covers about 3 people ...